US Backs OpenAI in NYT Copyright Fight

The federal government has taken a side in the fight over who owns the raw material feeding artificial intelligence. The Trump administration filed a brief in Manhattan federal court this week supporting OpenAI's argument that training large language models on copyrighted material generally qualifies as fair use, according to Reuters, which reported the brief was filed in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday and appears to be the first time the U.S. government has weighed in on a wave of cases brought by copyright owners including authors, publishers, music labels and news outlets over AI training.

The filing lands in the middle of The New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, a case that has become the bellwether for dozens of similar disputes across the industry. The lawsuit, first filed by the Times in 2023, accuses OpenAI and its largest financial backer, Microsoft, of using millions of newspaper articles without permission to train OpenAI's popular chatbot. The Times is not alone in that fight — the case is one of dozens brought by copyright holders against tech companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Platforms for what they say is misuse of their material to train AI systems.

What Does the Government Actually Argue?

The 20-page filing doesn't mince words. According to TechCrunch, the brief states that "The United States has a strong interest in continuing to develop a robust and competitive artificial intelligence industry that sets the standard for the practice and procedure of AI use globally," tying that interest directly to an executive order President Trump signed last year on AI leadership. The government goes further, arguing in more explicit terms that "The United States has a strong interest in this court rejecting any argument that training LLMs on copyrighted texts violates copyright law" based on concerns including scientific advancement and national security, Reuters reported.

The brief also wades directly into the legal mechanics of fair use. Government attorneys wrote that "The fair-use inquiry hinges on the specific facts and uses at issue in each case," but "it would be problematic — and legally incorrect — to impose broad copyright liability that would generally render training of AI models impermissible without licensing," adding that LLM training is "consistent with that creative 'progress' that is the basic constitutional objective of copyright itself." The filing pushes back specifically on the Times' legal strategy, arguing that "The New York Times seeks to narrow fair-use doctrine to exclude the training of OpenAI's large language models (LLMs)."

It's worth being clear about what this document can and can't do. As Reuters noted, a brief has advisory rather than legal weight but could bolster tech companies as they fight the claims. It doesn't bind the judge. But a statement of interest from the Department of Justice carries institutional weight that private litigants can't match, and the administration appears to know it — one official described the tactic as "incredibly" successful at advancing its policy aims, according to reporting on the administration's use of such filings in private litigation.

Why Is Washington Getting Involved in a Private Lawsuit?

The government's stated rationale leans heavily on the idea that copyright restrictions could hand China an edge in the AI race. That framing isn't new — OpenAI and Google have made the same argument directly to the White House. Companies like OpenAI and Google have argued, most recently in response to a Trump administration comment period as it shapes AI policy, that current copyright safeguards are too restrictive and will inhibit the growth of U.S. AI, giving China a lead in an era-defining technology. OpenAI made a nearly identical pitch in a proposal to the administration last year, writing that "America has so many AI startups, attracts so much investment, and has made so many research breakthroughs largely because the fair use doctrine promotes AI development."

The brief also points to tangible upside from LLMs beyond the litigation itself, stating that "Beyond the subject matter of this litigation, LLMs are already helping researchers across fields achieve major breakthroughs."

Not everyone in Washington's orbit agrees with that framing. Hundreds of alarmed Hollywood creatives sent the White House a letter warning of the danger to the entertainment industry if copyright is not honored, and separately, more than 400 Hollywood creatives and executives urged the Trump administration last year to reject proposals from OpenAI and Google that they argued would weaken copyright protections for their work.

How Does This Fit Into the Broader Legal Picture?

Courts have already started sketching out where the lines might fall, and the results have been mixed. The first two judges to consider the issue issued diverging rulings last year, leaving the doctrine unsettled heading into this filing. The most consequential data point so far came out of a different case entirely: Anthropic's fight with a group of book authors. A federal judge found that "The use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative," ruling the training itself was fair use — but the same judge found Anthropic's use of pirated copies to build its training library was not, sending that narrower question toward a settlement. That settlement ultimately closed at $1.5 billion, delivering $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works shared among the authors and publishers who hold rights to them, a sum a plaintiffs' attorney called the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in U.S. history.

That split matters for the Times case. The government's brief is arguing for the transformative-use half of that logic — the part that favored Anthropic — without addressing the piracy question that ultimately cost the company over a billion dollars. The Times, for its part, has continued pressing on the discovery front. In July 2026, the Times filed a motion for sanctions against OpenAI, alleging legal misconduct related to discovery and data handling, specifically accusing OpenAI of hiding its ability to access training data and manipulating ChatGPT conversations during the legal process.

Meanwhile, some publishers have simply opted out of litigation altogether. Dozens of media outlets have inked licensing deals with OpenAI, including The Associated Press, Axel Springer and Vox Media, and in 2025 The New York Times itself entered into a licensing deal with Amazon allowing its editorial content to appear in Amazon's generative AI tools.

What Changed This Week

The headline development is straightforward: the U.S. government, for the first time, formally entered an AI copyright case on the side of an AI developer. The brief frames unrestricted training access as a matter of national competitiveness and security rather than a narrow contract dispute between a chatbot maker and a newspaper. It doesn't resolve the underlying legal question — fair use is still being litigated case by case in front of different judges reaching different conclusions — but it signals where federal policy is headed just as similar suits from authors, musicians, and other publishers work their way through the courts.

What to Watch

The immediate question is how Judge Sidney Stein, who is overseeing the Times case in the Southern District of New York, weighs the government's brief against the Times' own sanctions motion, which remains unresolved. Beyond that, watch for how other AI defendants — Anthropic, Meta, and Google among them — cite this filing in their own pending suits, and whether the Times or its co-plaintiffs, the Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting, respond formally in court. The broader signal to track is whether the administration's position shows up again in future filings, given that officials have already described statements of interest as an effective tool for shaping AI policy outside of Congress.

Reporting based on coverage from Reuters, TechCrunch, The Verge, GV Wire, The Hill, and TheWrap, September 2026.